In recent times, it has become known to coextrude a strand of sausage material which has an inner core of meat emulsion having an outer surface material that can be coagulated to provide an encasement for the strand. The coagulation normally includes subjecting the extruded strand to a brine solution. The brine is applied immediately after the strand is extruded.
The brine is sometimes sprayed onto the sausage strand as the strand is moved along an elongated conveyor which is comprised of a plurality of pivotally interconnected links. Weight control in these processes is largely dependent upon the accuracy of the meat supply. Such coextrusion systems are therefore often equipped with metering pumps to ensure such accuracy. However, intermittent checks of sausage weights are still often required. Such checks are simply done by weighing one or more sausages as they come crimp/cut or linked from the linking device. When the weight is off target, the operator may adjust the meat-flow accordingly. This is more often the case with instable meat-doughs; those are meat formulations which in time differ in consistency. For instance English breakfast sausage meat formulations contain rusk. Rusk is an important ingredient comparable to breadcrumbs. When freshly mixed an English breakfast sausage meat-dough is fairly fluid. Gradually rusk starts to bind the free water in the dough causing the viscosity to rise. Most meat supply systems in use today are vulnerable for such viscosity changes, in the sense that they give various meat outputs. It is therefor common practice to check and balance the weight consistency of such sausage processes. This is true for common sausage casing stuffing, as well as for coextrusion processes.
Recently developments in sausage coextrusion technology have led to coextrusion processes where the brine treatment is prolonged in time. Older processes have brine dwell times of between 1 and 5 seconds. Newer processes have brine times of 30 to 90 seconds or more, depending on sausage end-product requirements. Several advantages over the older methods are obtained by prolonged brine times, however the practice of check and balance of the weight consistency is more difficult. The weight of individual sausages in these processes can only be determined after the coextruded sausage strand is crimped/cut or linked in the linking device. When brine times are for instance 60 seconds, at a common coextrusion speed of 100 cm per second, there are 60 meters of sausage already coextruded. If the check after the linking device dictates a change in meat flow, 60 meters of sausage is already off weight. Compared to the older methods, these new methods have therefor a worse weight control.
It is therefore a principal object of the present invention to provide a method for manufacturing co-extruded food strands with an edible casing in which the previous problems and disadvantages of the known co-extrusion methods do not occur.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a novel method for reducing the weight variation of co-extruded sausages.
An additional object of the present invention is to create by co-extrusion a substantially uniform layer of a collagen containing gel around an elongated strand of foodstuff, coagulating said foodstuff by contacting it with a salt containing brine, and determining the weight variation accuracy after said co-extrusion but before linking of the coextruded sausage strand.
These and other objects will become clear from the following description of the present invention.